With gilt chandeliers 50 feet overhead and long strips of fabric draped over the windows, the theater looked like something out of a Stanley Kubrick film. The makeshift curtains ballooned in thermal updrafts above the radiators, creating rippling pockets of shadow around the edges of the room. On stage a band was tearing through a Cheap Trick tune, but the drummer hadn’t learned his part yet and the guitarist stopped strumming to stomp out the rhythm, his boots echoing in the cavernous, empty room.
Normally, Richard would be up there too, on auxiliary percussion, but he took the night off to tell me the story of how he came to Fort Lyon and got clean. Richard is 54 years old and had been sober for seven months, one of his longer stretches — discounting the six-year stint he did in prison. “But that was forced sobriety,” he said. He was making a choice now.
He was trying to tell me about losing his daughter but his voice kept getting drowned out by the amplified hair metal, so we exited the theater and stepped into the icy Colorado air. Somewhere beyond the women’s dorms, we heard coyotes chattering in the dark. Richard (who asked that I not use his last name, as did several others in this story) walked with a stiff splay-footed gait on account of his toes having been amputated last winter, frostbitten casualties of a drunken blackout in the snow.
[For more of this story, written by Will McGrath, go to https://psmag.com/radical-effo...7b532185b#.eujv3miof]
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